How to make a method sleep without affecting the responsiveness of the GUI

Question

Hi,
I want to make a method sleep for a few second before executing the rest of its body. Apparently Thread.sleep(10000) doesn't do the job as it makes the GUI non-responsive.
Any advice would be deeply appreciated.
Thomas

Answer 1

Here's an example:
package tjacobs.ui.ex;
import java.awt.Color;
import javax.swing.Icon;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import tjacobs.ui.util.WindowUtilities;
* @author tjacobs
public class Blink extends JLabel implements Runnable {
     public static final long DEFAULT_TIME_LENGTH = 1000;
     private long mTimeLength = DEFAULT_TIME_LENGTH;
     private String mLabel;
     private Icon mIcon;a
     public void run() {
          mLabel = getText();
          mIcon = getIcon();
          try {               
               while (true) {
                    Thread.sleep(mTimeLength);
                    String current = getText();
                    if (current.equals(mLabel)) {
                         setText("");
                         setIcon(null);
                    else {
                         setText(mLabel);
                         setIcon(mIcon);
                    repaint();
          catch (InterruptedException ex) {
               ex.printStackTrace();
          finally {
               setText(mLabel);
               setIcon(mIcon);
     public Blink() {
     public Blink(String arg0) {
          super(arg0);
     public Blink(Icon arg0) {
          super(arg0);
     public Blink(String arg0, int arg1) {
          super(arg0, arg1);
     public Blink(Icon arg0, int arg1) {
          super(arg0, arg1);
     public Blink(String arg0, Icon arg1, int arg2) {
          super(arg0, arg1, arg2);
     public void setBlinkTime(long time) {
          mTimeLength = time;
     public long getBlinkTime() {
          return mTimeLength;
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          // TODO Auto-generated method stub
          Blink b = new Blink("Hello World");
          b.setBackground(Color.RED);
          WindowUtilities.visualize(b);
          b.setFont(b.getFont().deriveFont(24.0f));
          b.run();
}